England Vs. San Marino.

In reality, international games shouldn't come much easier that a home tie against San Marino, a team ranked joint bottom of the FIFA rankings.

Sitting equal 207th on the list with Bhutan and Turks and Caicos Islands, in the battle to be the worlds worst international football team, makes this one of many stupid mis-matches in competitive top level football, which is for me, one of the reasons why the paying public are rapidly losing interest in international football and all the arguments over it helping establish small and developing nations in the world game is total rubbish and the sooner FIFA and the other governing bodies look at a complete restructuring of the international game the better.

Anyway, thats my rant over for now at least. When we consider that you could fit the whole population of San Marino into many Premiership stadiums, it should give an indication into the huge gulf in size between the two countries and it perhaps represents an ideal opportunity for Roy Hodgson to effectively pick a shadow England team, with the much tougher task of facing Poland on Tuesday. This is perhaps doubly important, as Poland don't have a game this evening, so would expect to be fresh and able to focus totally on England and not have any other distraction, irrespective of how easy is should be.

Playing several squad players could of course make this a fixture of some merit, whilst also allowing Steven Garrard and Glen Johnson to use up their suspensions. Perhaps we should be looking at giving the likes of John Ruddy, Kyle Walker, Michael Carrick and a few others, starts, and in attack, why not look at giving Andy Carroll a confidence boost, in a game you feel he can totally dominate a weak defence, while also offering a useful Plan B, should we find ourselves with ten San Marino shirts packed behind the ball.

San Marino have only played one Group game so far and that was a 6-0 home thrashing against Montenegro and I expect England to inflict similar damage tonight, regardless what starting XI Hodgson goes with. Hardly a game to make a statement and to a degree the only one that would surprise the football world, would be for England to only get a narrow win. If we consider that San Marion have only ever won one international game (a friendly against Liechtenstein in April 2004) and have only ever gained two competitive points in a total of three draws in their history, you perhaps think that England's 1/100 odds are reasonable, even slightly mean..

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